It’s the ethanol in gas, hand soap, adhesives, chewing gum, paints and fireworks, most medication, makeup and so on and so on.
In: Chemistry
First, corn is incredibly adaptable, can grow pretty much anywhere in the world where there are warm seasons, and responds well to breeding. Corn was not a serious crop anywhere until the early part of the 20th century when new hybrid forms were bred that had larger ears and allowed corn stalks to grow much more closely together. Corn production took off after that, because farmers could get significantly higher yields — more corn to take to market — from the same plot of land.
Second, modern corn is incredibly *energy dense*. In fact, it has the highest calorie/gram ratio of any modern vegetable because of its high starch (carbohydrate) content — although potatoes are right on its heels. This makes it a superb source of calories, which is why a huge percentage of the corn grown is used as cattle feed.
Third, mostly because of that high carbohydrate content, modern corn is incredibly versatile and can be processed into numerous different forms: the germ/bran of the grains can be processed into oils and the starch can be processed into mulitple forms, including corn starch (which has many uses from cooking to adhesives to medical uses), or further processed into very energy-dense sugars (e.g. corn syrup), and those sugars can further be fermented and distilled into alcohols (whiskey) or ethanols (fuel).
Very little of the corn grown in the US is actually eaten by humans *as corn* in its natural form. The overwhelming majority of corn is grown (a) for cattle feed (and those cultivars are mostly inedible for humans) or (b) to be processed into other forms for industrial uses.
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